The short version
As Gemini Notebook (and other AI tools) roll out to schools, are education professionals violating copyright or being innovative when they put limited license materials into tools like Gemini Notebook?
Watching and listening to a webinar today, I saw the presenter make some great points about how powerful Gemini Notebook is. But, as a member of the audience, I decided to take a contrarian perspective when I saw the presenter share a PDF out of News-o-Matic then put that into Gemini Notebook. The demonstration was mostly about Gemini Notebook, but given that the presenter was a librarian, I suffered some cognitive dissonance at watching the presenter put stuff into Gemini Notebook. Having been called out myself at some point for this exact offense, I am sensitive when I see it happen.
Copyright Violation or Innovative Use?
Here’s ChatGPT’s take on the issue:
I would not assume that uploading complete News-O-Matic article PDFs into Gemini Notebook/NotebookLM is permitted, even when the purpose is educational.
News-O-Matic gives subscribers a limited license to use its materials for educational, noncommercial purposes, but its terms also say the content may not be reproduced, distributed, hosted, adapted, or used to create derivative works without authorization. (News-O-Matic Website)
That restriction matters because uploading the PDF to Notebook creates a copy outside News-O-Matic’s system and then allows Google to process it into summaries, quizzes, audio, video, flashcards, and other artifacts.
Google also explicitly tells Gemini Notebook users to avoid uploading documents they do not have rights to and to respect copyright law.(Google Help)
What I would consider the practical boundaries
| Use | Risk level | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Upload your own notes summarizing the News-O-Matic article | 🟢 Low | You created the notes |
| Enter facts, vocabulary, or concepts from the article | 🟢 Low | Copyright generally protects expression, not facts |
| Use brief quotations with attribution for analysis | 🟡 Usually more defensible | May qualify as fair use depending on amount and purpose |
| Upload an entire News-O-Matic PDF privately to generate teaching materials | 🟠 Questionable | Educational purpose helps, but the News-O-Matic license appears to restrict reproduction/adaptation |
| Give students access to a Notebook containing the complete article | 🔴 Higher | Now you are effectively redistributing access to copyrighted material |
| Publish/share the Notebook publicly | 🔴 Avoid | Google’s own rules say not to share copyrighted material without the necessary rights (Google Help) |
One nice point to consider is that **Google Workspace for Education does not use those uploaded Notebook materials to train its AI models or send them to human reviewers. (Google Help).
That is helpful for privacy, but itdoesn’t grant copyright permission.
The safer classroom workflow
Instead of putting the News-O-Matic PDF itself into Notebook:
News-O-Matic → teacher/student reads licensed article → notes or extracted concepts → Gemini Notebook
For example, you could create a source containing:
Topic: Radiation-eating fungi at Chernobyl Key facts from News-O-Matic: [teacher-written notes] Vocabulary: melanin, radiation, Cladosporium sphaerospermum Questions I want students to investigate: Source: News-O-Matic, article title/date
Then Notebook can generate the mind map, quiz, study guide, or discussion questions fromyour instructional notes rather than a copied commercial article.
Fair use could potentially support some limited classroom uses, particularly private, transformative analysis. But because News-O-Matic’s subscription agreement contains explicit restrictions, I would ask News-O-Matic for written permission before establishing “upload News-O-Matic articles into Gemini Notebook” as a recommended teacher workflow. That would give you a much cleaner answer than relying on fair use.
The Rule?
One rule to adopt may be:
“Do not upload subscription articles or commercial curriculum to Gen AI tools unless the publisher’s license expressly permits it. Use teacher-created notes, brief excerpts, or openly licensed materials instead.”
As we all get more accustomed to working with Gen AI, it’s expected the rules around it will change. Will we change with them or not?